Cleanup Effort Aims To Shrink Great Pacific Garbage Patch By 50% In Just 5 Years

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The Great Pacific Garbage patch is big. Really, really big. It’s difficult to put a precise figure on it, but experts who’ve tried offer approximations ranging from the size of Texas to twice the whole of the continental U.S.

That’s somewhere between 700,000 and 15,000,000 square kilometers of trash, all floating together in the middle of the Pacific Ocean like we tried to fire it into space, failed, watched it come crashing back down, and subsequently forgot about it.

The Ocean Cleanup certainly hasn’t forgotten, if that wasn’t obvious from the foundation’s name. In fact, they took to YouTube this week to unveil a new passive collection system that they’ve been working on for years.

This new system, they say, will be able to make a huge dent in the size of the Garbage Patch. Within just 5 years of deploying it, The Ocean Cleanup believes they’ll be able to reduce its size by 50%. Comprised of a large high-density polyethylene (HDPE) barrier and a screen, the system can gather all kinds of floating waste, from massive discarded fishing nets to bits of plastic as small as 1cm.

Testing off the coast of California gets under way this year and they plan to begin deployment next year — almost two years ahead of schedule. It’s not a single mammoth collector they’re setting up. The Ocean Cleanup will utilize “a fleet of systems,” in their effort to shrink the Garbage Patch. Almost like the Simpsons episode about the plastic six-pack rings.

Their efforts will make a huge difference, though there’s the rather large problem of very small garbage that needs to be addressed. A lot of what makes up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is much smaller than the 1cm openings in the new system’s screens, and it will prove much more troublesome to clean up.